Story Highlights

The federal government's new Web portal for health insurance lags the rest of the health care industry in performance, and the problems could have been prevented with adequate pre-testing, according to a new analysis by Compuware APM, which monitors and manages the performance of websites and other Internet-based assets.

Compuware, which works for many Fortune 500 retailers and other companies, says it was not among the companies consulted by the federal government as it grapples with the glitch-prone healthcare.gov. But the company plans to issue specific "Get Well" recommendations for the government Tuesday after doing more investigation.

Among the HealthCare.gov issues Compuware found in its initial analysis:

• Optimization. Many images and resources are not optimized. That is, all the website elements don't run as fast or robustly as they could. This can cause slow load times from some regions.

• Performance. Users in the West and Midwest have slower load times than those in the rest of the country.

• Third party impact. Some of the Web services the site depends upon can't handle the traffic load being generated.

• Inadequate testing. The site's major problems would have been discovered if engineers had performed the standard practice of external testing from around the U.S. before the site's launch.

While healthcare.gov's failures aren't unusual, "they plague any Web application that is not properly tested and deeply monitored," Compuware concluded. The government must do modem monitoring and troubleshooting from "the outside in," the analysis recommends.